Looking In
by AmberPalette
Summary: Various thirdperson ruminations by Draco Malfoy.


Looking In

(Or A Brief and Self-Indulgent Harry Potter Fanfiction Vignette With the Obvious Ulterior Motive of Inspiring Some Fellow HP Fans and Rejuvenating the Interest of Others Who Have Strayed from Said Ranks and Anything Else That Comes to Mind in This Unsurpassedly Long Title)

by AmberPalette

Disclaimer: Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter, Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger, and all other canon Harry Potter series characters are © Ms. J.K. Rowling and I claim no ownership nor profit thereof. Alexis and Margaret Renard are © ME. Haylin Daire, Jewlie Wells Renard, and Susan Collins are © Lindsay Fisk and used with permission. Jen Clayton is © Karen Melchior and used with permission. Joan Elle Norris is © Lucinda Langley and used with permission.

I am writing this in between Christmas present wrapping marathons on my meager university winter break. It was inspired by a series of frustrating personal events and my desire to constructively channel my experience through the character of Draco Malfoy in a short and spontaneous fanfiction, as opposed to taking a pickaxe to a couple of professors' bah-humbugging heads. For that reason, I have written the work in one sitting and frankly don't give rat droppings what anyone thinks of it.

**Nevertheless, I do hope that some of you manage to enjoy it. :)**

**This takes place in some vague, amorphous book seven/Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows timeline (even though the book is not yet released) and is therefore a speculative, stream-of-consciousness, psychological study sort of thing. It has Draco Malfoy as a third person narrator and it does a couple of flashbacks. I support the theory that Lucius Malfoy is psychologically (and possibly physically) abusive to his son and that, because of Fenrir Greyback, Draco is a werewolf post-Half-Blood-Prince. If you are NOT willing to be open-minded about these theories, which DO have contextual evidence in canon, PLEASE just DON'T READ this story. I don't really CARE if you disagree with me about a work of FICTION. Let's try to remember that these books are meant to stimulate respectful intellectual discussion and to be fun and recreational. They are not religious tomes nor are they historical texts. Many thanks.**

**FYI, this is just a very brief supplement to my more thorough musings on the Malfoys. I've done a far more comprehensive fanfiction series on the Malfoys, titled "Wood Sorrel and Dragon Pox," and featured both at DeviantART and at **

Three Broomsticks, Winter, Timeline: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows 

The scent of stale beer and sweaty bodies permeated the tavern as two young men in plain, oversized gray cloaks, hoods up, slipped in. The leader, who moved confidently but quietly, was of moderate height, slender but broad-shouldered, with the posture of a stubborn but unwitting hero. His falconlike black hair peeked out of the corners of his hood, his lips thinned in thought, his drilling emerald eyes dancing from point to point in the place. "Some pumpkin juice looks appealing right now," Harry Potter breathed, combing his spiky bangs over top of his telltale lightning bolt scar. "Call it a spy mission craving."

"Curious, but ultimately banal, Potter." His partner was several inches his senior, with sleek hair like creamy snow, skin like white marble, and almost ethereally fine, crisp features. The bridge of his aristocratically straight, pointy little nose curled. "We've got a Legilimens in our midst," Draco Malfoy drawled. His desolate gray eyes pierced the room.

"Who?" Harry mumbled back instinctually.

"….Well, I dunno, Potter, why don't you just go up to each individual and ask them in person, and when one of them buggers out your brains, we'll know and I'll have a good laugh."

"Listen, Malfoy, I'm sure you think yourself stunningly witty and all, but I'm being serious here."

"So am I! I don't KNOW yet, all right? What d'you think I'm LOOKING for?"

"Keep your VOICE down, dammit."

"The trouble with you, Harry, is you expect the worst of every situation." Draco laughed, hoarsely, ironically. It was nothing like the loud, brassy, egotistical cackle of his earlier years. "No, really, I'd rather my ass weren't fried, either. Sorry."

"Er okay, but don't call me Harry, it's creepy."

"Okay, Manky Bastard Shitface. Potty. Good?"

"Much better." Harry ambled to a table near the back of the room. "A little normalcy never hurt anyone trying to save the bloody world. If I didn't have your assholery to combat every day, I think I might lie down and quit."

"How touching. Normalcy." Malfoy, following him, laughed again, in that hollow way. "Continuity. Forever, unchanging. Great expectations. I honestly wish they weren't an illusion…" There were so many people, lost and abandoned, hiding and hurt, that he was thinking of as he spoke.

"…Really?" It sounded suspiciously like Potter was agreeing with him, instead of asking a question, but Draco would never dare ask. He squinted at nearby customers.

"Yeah. Really….aha. Third table to the right, green cloak. Aw, Potty, green like your glistening mossy eyes of joy."

"Shut up."

"Yeah yeah well there's our Death Eater Leglimency spy, go gettim, Tiger."

"Don't move."

"Like I have anywhere else to go. God save Hogsmeade." Draco raised his imaginary glass of ale to Harry's annoyed face, and lay in wait while the Chosen One galloped off to save the universe from imminent destruction. Always waiting, always looking. Looking in from the outside.

Hogsmeade, Winter, Timeline: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 

Draco remembered Hogsmeade bittersweetly. Memories of an innocent past always proved distorted and idealized. There had never been a time when Draco was really free of the burden of perennial expectation and disappointment. By both others and himself. But, always, OF himself.

He remembered how he felt one day when fifteen, when he had been in a fight with the girlfriend who habitually replaced Pansy Parkinson, a girl he truly loved and felt more comfortable with than he would ever feel with the prissy pugnosed brat to whom he had been betrothed since birth…. but also a girl who, unlike the clingy and pink-clad Pansy, pushed him away, and sent him back to Pansy.

A girl named Joan Elle Norris. A Slytherin. A short but sturdy girl, a girl with movements of predatory, dark grace, a girl with thick polished ebony hair, the scent of summer on her skin, and catlike caramel eyes. A girl who purred deep in her throat when he kissed her. A mystery and a reward and a security all wrapped into one. THE girl whose name was on his lips, an awed mumble, when he woke in his four-poster from a troubling and beautiful dream.

But Draco feared rejection and loss, and insufficiency of self. And Joan Elle feared intimacy, with any living being, aside Filch's mangy red-eyed cat, who often prowled the secret passageways of Hogwarts with her. Draco had stumbled blindly through those dark corridors himself, in pursuit of Joan Elle, proving himself to her, proving his efforts, his constance, his fealty. It never seemed like he could quite keep her in his grasp. Sometimes the thought of the perpetual challenge that his Sphinx gave him was alluring. But lately it left him afraid of permanent loss. And so he stood at the mouth of those hidden passageways with their musty scent and their cobwebs, straining for a trace of his girl inside. His girl, his girl.

Looking in.

His faith faltering. He was always someone who lived up to the meaning of his French surname: Bad faith. He felt so damned useless, sometimes, because of it. And he missed her. And he missed so many other things as well, things he once had and things he felt he could never really reach….and he was only 15.

There was a foyer of frost-encased ivy into the grounds of Hogsmeade, a large archway beyond the cobblestone bridge where he and Joan Elle often met to share their first kiss of the day. One day fifth year, all the other students were down at the other end of that snow-sloshed, footprinted path. All enjoying themselves. Was anyone even talking about him? Did he yet exist?

His father had "forgotten" to sign his permission slip on time for this visit. Because Draco had lost a recent Quidditch match, because he was mad at Joan Elle for withholding information about her murdered parents from him and confiding in their mutual friend Jen Clayton instead. He was not focusing on the Snitch in that manic whirling splashing of colors and shapes, because he would rather stare into her eyes in the stands and wish to God he could be a Legilimens and know Joan Elle utterly, and not be shut out so bloody often. But Lucius didn't care, Lucius had told him there was no excuse for slovenly playing, least of all romantic drama….as if Lucius had won every damned match in his school days. Then yes, Lucius had "forgotten" to sign the bloody release form.

Draco's mother airily laughed and denied that Lucius would be so petty to his son, that the grant proposal paperwork from the Ministry of Magic was just "heavy on father's mind at this time of year."

Part of Draco still managed to believe Narcissa wholly. And his own submissive blindness disgusted the other part of him. But Lucius was his hero, and always would be. So he would cradle and bless his blindness as well. Hell, he would build a shrine to that blindness, built from his own ashamed mumblings, blushings, and tears.

Draco saw all the professors in his path that day at Hogsmeade, should he attempt to cross that entryway. He considered trying anyway. The scolding and screaming and uproarious laughter of students that would follow echoed like distant wind-carried voices in his head. The consequences played over and over, frantically, like a sped-up, crackling strip of celluloid. Father would be summoned to have a discussion with his only child for his irreverence. Draco's shoulderblades ached with the ghost of his father's cane. It would hurt. It would hurt either way. That used to suffocate him, the indecision, the concept of inevitable punishment. But he didn't care anymore. He smirked at this fact, for no reason that he could grasp. He shivered because he was cold, not afraid.

No, no. Not afraid of losing Joan Elle. Not afraid of disappointing his father. No. He was not. Dammit! He was not!

His gossamer blond hair tickled his chill-pinked cheeks and nose. His eyes—huge clear mirrors—mercilessly reflected back the glittering, pale gray desolation of the landscape. They were the color of icy vapor blown out from a child's lips in December. Yes, his father's eyes were the color of January, of a world hopelessly imprisoned under hail, snow, and sleet. But Draco's eyes scintillated. They tottered over the edge of hopelessness, but were yet capable of warmth. Like someone hiking through a snowbank during Christmastime, still able to gaze at the twinkling lights inside a warm, festive house, and appreciate it.

Looking in.

He inhaled the dull sweet scent of fresh snow-wetted wool. He secretly longed for a large, ugly, cozy pair of home-darned socks, a warm blanket, and the smell of a wood-burning fire.

Screw it. Screw them. Screw them all. They hadn't an inkling of what loneliness and disappointment were, and they thought they knew him because he wore Gladrags designer sweaters and said snotty things to his peers, because he had the complexion of an Aryan, and because he had a swaggering gait. They thought his world was peachy and simple because his parents had money and he excelled in sports and academics, and that they by comparison knew the meaning of true misery. They thought misery was their patented possession to parade. Dilettante sufferers. Hypocrites. Angst whores. All of them. They did not know a fucking thing about another human being's pain. And they called HIM a bastard.

Draco stepped across the threshold and defiantly smirked as Professor McGonagall glided towards him in her tartan robes. She reset her spectacles, opened her mouth, and began the chastising.

Lucius was summoned that afternoon.

That evening Joan Elle apologized to Draco for her evasiveness and withdrawal, and he readily accepted. If only she had known that, as they cuddled in front of the Slytherin dungeon commonroom fire, each time she stroked his back, her hand caused the fiery pain of his sweater nestling into the fresh welts of a caning. But Joan Elle mistook Draco's private pains for ambivalence, and unwillingness to forgive her just yet. So she retired to bed early, looking sad and confused.

If only she had known that now was Draco's turn to hide something.

Order of the Phoenix Hideout, Grimmauld Place, Winter, Timeline: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

_The dull sweet scent of fresh snow-wetted wool. _Draco's fifth year at Hogsmeade was not the last time he was to smell that disquietingly nostalgic aroma.

The night after Draco and that damned Potter had found out the Death Eater spy at the Order's most promising information haunt, Draco had been allowed to retire to his late cousin Sirius Black's unplottable home for the evening, for his own safety. He brought Jen Clayton, an unlikely friend since third year, with him; what no one knew was Draco had cast the Imperio on Jen of her own request, in order to protect her from the Dark Lord, as her father had been a prominent opponent to the Death Eaters during their first reign of terror. And as Jen refused to leave his side.

Draco added this tainted means to an end, the product of a friend's loyalty to his unworthy carcass, to his tally of things of which to be ashamed before reaching the age of 20.

Now, as Jen, a Gryffindor alumna whom he had nicknamed "Rhi," sat knitting scarves for various Order members, Draco inhaled that smell on the approaching Dimwitted Carrothead From Hell, Ronald Weasley. The urge to gag nearly overpowered him.

Ron had been sitting in a rickety rocking chair next to the irritatingly brilliant and strongwilled Hermione Granger, trying to convince her of his usefulness in an upcoming dangerous mission. Granger stood and turned to face one of the murky black walls of the former mansion. Weasley, the buffoon, apparently realized that he had lost, and strode over to talk to his fellow Gryffindor—as though Draco were not present—to blow off steam.

"Hullo, Clayton…wow….you're not bad at that….magic fingers, eh? Maybe I can persuade you to help mum. She keeps trying to make me wear that damned new Christmas sweater…makes me one every year, it's kind of dumb and the product, well, manky is a nice word for it, but mums, got to love them…"

Oh, brilliant, Weaselbee, bring up mothers to Rhi, whose mum Sarah was killed by the Dark Lord when she was a toddler.

_Yes, Draco, but you've been shitting your pants in excitement over working for Voldemort yourself. _

_Ah. Loser. Loser loser loser. _

Jen blinked lifelessly at Ron, her eyes unfocused and glazed by the Imperius. _Smile and thank him, Rhi, _Draco mentally willed, and Jen politely obeyed, in her soft and gentle soprano.

"So that's a yes?" The idiot went on. "Brilliant! Did you hear that, Harry, Jen Clayton's going to knit mum's sweaters this Christmas!"

Potter limped in tiredly, poring over some tome about Horcruxes, waving at Ron and grunting in distracted approval.

"No, come ON Harry, pay attention, you KNOW the kind of sorry things my dear old mum craps out—"

Draco made a disgusted noise in his throat, the familiar sneer lines forming on his far too beautiful alabaster face. His ears hummed with an ever-growing, but, to him, mysterious, rage. "Weasley, shut up already."

Potter groaned. He removed his glasses and massaged the bridge of his nose. Then he pretended to clean the lenses thoroughly.

Ron's skin color warmed to match his freckles. "What?"

"How many bloody sob stories are you going to tell about that damned old family shack of yours? You going to lament the rotting of every ruddy shingle? I mean, it's not OUR fault you're poor."

Jen jumped, grabbing Draco's hand, attempting to pacify him.

It reminded him of his mother, who was in danger of murder by Voldemort, also because of his own failures, and it made him angrier. He pulled his hand away, and snapped, "DON'T, Rhi, this is for YOU. You heard me, Weaselbee, cut it OUT."

"You know, Malfoy," Ron's voice flared, "it's really funny that the most annoying, big-mouthed person in this room would be the one to tell someone else to put a sock in it!"

"Oh, socks. Do go on." Malfoy smirked; it seemed to take more effort than usual, but he succeeded. "Do now tell us about the socks that mummy darned for every birthday since your eleventh! Or are you going to go off on a tangent on your girlfriend's house elf liberation?"

Hermione's eyes narrowed to dagger slits and her lips went white. "Ron," she said acidly, "don't let an immature, cruel little prat bait you."

"So you ARE his girlfriend?" Malfoy let out an incredulous chortle.

"That is not the point," she hissed.

"Guys," Harry moaned.

"Shut up, Potter," Draco snapped, his snickers immediately dwindling.

"Shut up, Harry," Ron growled, simultaneously.

They blinked, then gazed at each other with pure unabashed loathing.

Harry, who looked like he was going to bark "make me" at Draco, instead groaned at the two again. And polished his glasses again. Hermione offered to cast a cleaning spell on them. He sighed at her and declined the offer.

"What have you got against me, anyway, Malfoy?" Ron exploded, piercing the silence, with what appeared to be a true loss of comprehension. "I mean, it's like you hate me for the hell of it, and always have! I don't give a rat's ass, mind you, but it gets annoying! What the bloody hell did I do? I mean it can't just be that whole stupid blood traitor thing…"

"MAYBE not everyone is all keen to hear about your PERFECT FAMILY, WEASEL!" Draco roared back, with his typical breed of sudden emotional fluctuation—chilliness became volcanism in three seconds' time. He shot upright, body stiffening. "Or LOOK at it, or even THINK about it. You BLOODY ASSFACE!"

Ron blinked at him again. "Huh?"

"Never mind!"

"No, WHAT? What do you mean PERFECT?"

"Does your father still look at you when ONE O.W.L. isn't Outstanding?" There was a funny thin edge to the usual arrogant drawl. "Is he still willing to accompany you to Flourish and Blott's the day before classes if you forget which is the salad fork, or neglect to bow to one of his business guests, or fail to make it into Blaise Zabini's father's Dark Arts United Men's Club?"

Jen stopped sewing and covered her face.

To Harry's and Hermione's astonishment, no doubt, Draco started to tremble—violently. His cheeks and earlobes turned that dull pink that Harry now recognized as an indicator of intense embarrassment. "Does your mother ignore it when there are…marks...on your arms and back and ASS that you can't and won't explain? And if you saw some undeserving IDIOT who said NO to all these questions I've just asked, who thought that you had it all just because you got a new broom every year and a big box of Honeydukes candies every week, and lived in a mansion, wouldn't you HATE HIM TOO? WELL?!"

Ron's face had gone blank. "….Whatever, Malfoy," he mumbled, gnawing on the side of his lip as he returned to his chair. His eyebrows were knitted together as though he was trying to decide how much he believed Draco's unintentional confession. "Speaking of SOB stories," he added, almost unwillingly.

Harry stared at Malfoy across the room; the Slytherin prince was hunched over in his chair like a brooding praying mantis. Without his glasses, Draco was just a pale, thin blob against a desolate black wall. Hardly the menacing foe that Harry knew. This troubled him. Soon, though, he let it pass.

They couldn't have known what Draco was thinking about. It was common knowledge, now, what Draco was, aside a double-agent 17-year-old Death Eater and groundbreakingly young Occlumens. But Draco had already told people who meant more to him than this forced band of allies. More important people had looked into him and seen it.

And the fact that he let down his guard and allowed them to see the ugly pain he had to bear….it made him feel despicable.

The Home of Order of the Phoenix Member Haylin Patrick Daire, the Previous Autumn, Timeline: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Mid-November, the day he had felt so despicable. All day of his first visit to Haylin's house since the second war had gone full tilt, Draco had tried to avoid a conversation that Margaret Renard, a surrogate little sister since he was barely 13, had been trying to start. But she cornered him in the foyer of the dining room.

"Do you remember that I decided to make you my child's Godfather, Draco? I hope it is a girl, but I will be happy either way--"

"I love you, Margaret. So much." Draco said it with deep-seated, fierce sincerity, but somehow in a whisper. His face was viciously scrunched up, like the statement was so intense and overflowing a part of him that it was agonizing to keep silent about it. "Always, always know that, Margaret. You're always going to be my sister." No matter what happens.

What? His eyes were bloodshot! Was he going to cry? Draco Malfoy?

Margaret had not heard him say her full name since they'd first met, when she was a child of ten. This was probably why, no matter how much warmth and affection his words stirred inside her, she knew that something was wrong. But she must have been too afraid to ask. She could not hear another snag in the tapestry of their newly-salvaged lives—she could not lose him again.

So she kept talking. Her hands tightened around the autumn décor that Haylin's sweet wife, Susan Daire, had handed her as preparation for the coming season. "Anyway, we can start planning now. Would you mind living close to me, so that you can visit her frequently? I would really like that…Muggle apartments are not so bad, maybe if the Manor is too big for you, you can move into a smaller space…."

"No, Margaret…"

"And you'll have children, or a child, whatever, with Joan Elle Norris, and I will make it like my own, Draco, and…"

A child? No. No. He could not have a child. He could not repeat his father's mistakes.

But he had always dreamed of someday asking a specialty carving shop to make a baby carriage from scratch, out of mahogany wood, with his name and Joan Elle's, Dragon and Sphinx, carved across the rim. Could it someday be…?

No, no….He could not burden Joan Elle, with her fragile trust, with her heart guarded by barbed wires and deceptive blankets of indifference, with his failure and his dangerousness as a…

As a….

It came out as though retched up, hasty, pained and hoarse: "Margaret, I'm a WEREWOLF…I'm a werewolf."

Margaret stopped talking. The plate of gourds and amberglass marbles slipped from her hands and crashed to the ground. Some of the gourds rolled, a few were smashed. The beads rolled everywhere, a mad sparkling sea of orange-red spheres.  
It had happened in late autumn. Right before December and Christmastime. He had been bitten in autumn.

Falling leaves…… it had been quiet. No struggle. In the Room of Requirement. No struggle at all. He was that great a coward, really.

Greyback had made it autumn like the Hogwarts grounds, had lain Draco forward on his face, pressing a hot, shaggy, coarse hand down on the small of his bare back and lain down on top of him, so that Draco could not scream, or even breathe. He had told him to hold still or he would kill him. He told him to let himself be bitten or he would go to Malfoy Manor and bite his mother instead. Penetrate her skin horribly. Mutilate and violate her. "You've got no options, Draco. Submit. Submit or die. Embrace your bad faith, embrace your victimization to fate. Submit. Good boy. Bad faith, mal-foi…mall-foiiii…how curiously ironic your name is, boy….now hold still…."

And then the full moon came out.

That horrible cruel voice, that laugh of the damned, still breathed onto the fair thin back of his neck to this day. He could still smell Fenrir's awful breath, it stank of human blood….

He distinctly remembered now. That had been the day, and the moment, that he decided he hated Death Eaters and Voldemort and Salazar Slytherin and the entire latitudes and longitudes that governed his beliefs and values and world. He even hated his father in that moment. Purely.

And so he became a person utterly and completely alone.

And now? Draco would give anything in that same whole world to wipe away the look that came upon Margaret's face. He had never seen such sorrow, and he despised that he was the cause of it. "I'm so sorry, Maggie." Now the nickname was back, on the tail end of hot, torrential, uncontrollable tears. "I'm so sorry." Something inside him crumpled and died the second time in two years. Or perhaps the millionth time. Who knew?

In the dining room nearby, in the middle of organizing a cornucopia and leaf motif spread on the table, Alexis Renard made a startled noise and looked up. His wife Jewlie, smoothing the decorative leaves calmly as though she had heard no disturbance, didn't seem surprised in the least by the cacophony in the living room, but there was more than a little sorrow in her large brown eyes. Susan had already come dashing in at the sound of the splattering gourds, and now she hesitated behind the tall, skinny young man and his short, sweet, curvy Maggie. Her fingers reached her lips in startlement, but she did not intrude.

Draco surrendered to violent sobs, and it must have been intensely painful, for despite trembling all over and covering a contorted, agonized face, he managed to make not a single gasp of sound. He was a Malfoy. How did those damned people manage it? And everyone thought they owned everything. They were damned paupers, when it came to the important things.

"Why are you sorry?" Margaret was quite evidently crying as well, by the shiver in her voice. She stepped through the destroyed vegetables, splattering gourd-guts on the calves of her nice dress. She didn't notice. She embraced him. A tsunami-wind would have difficulty extricating her. "Dieu, mon Dieu."

"Who did it?" Haylin Daire's voice, behind his benevolent, gently concerned wife, was soft but utter murder. His eyes blazed burnished ore even across the room. "I'll kill him. I'll fucking rend his limbs apart. You tell me who did it NOW."

"He'll be dead soon, Haylin." This was all Draco could manage, in a thick and hiccupping voice, while Margaret, who wasn't even tall enough to reach his chest, held him. "Dead, gone. It doesn't matter now."

"Like HELL it doesn't! WHO?" More violently, ignoring Susan's gentle, careful implorations and "shh, darling, not now" 's—but Susan hadn't heard it yet. Haylin only heard it because he, too, was a werewolf, and had the hearing of Canis lupus.

"Greyback."

Renard, the descendent of Aurors, froze on his entry, face almost predatory at the name. "What about him?"

Draco let out a plaintive moan. For the first time in his life, he despised being the center of attention. "Please, not now, please let it alone…"

"Christ," Haylin groaned, like a wolf kicked in the ribs. Then his face flattened with the apathy of a desperate effort to control one's temper. "Fuckin' hell. No." He paced around the perimeter of the room, flashing looks at Draco and Margaret that oscillated between brilliant gold and the natural emerald of his irises. "Inn' FAIR," he finally growled, crushing gourd guts under his bare foot, jaw set, as though they were Greyback's brains. He kicked another one with a strangled noise, and it splattered.

"Fuckin' A, Haylin," Draco snapped, immediately hating himself for the ungrateful, surly sarcasm laced within the retort. His cheeks blazed. "Oh, shite, I'm sorry, it's just…"

"I know." The person whom he'd come to revere, long ago, as a sort of protective older brother, sharply nodded, turning away again, resuming his pacing. "Believe me, I know, kid. Runt. Skittles. Pissant. Whatever nickname y'wanna be called these days."  
Draco felt a strange, hiccuping laugh bubbling up as he crumpled to his knees and allowed Margaret to cradle his head. "Any of those'll do, mate. I…love 'em all." He watched the fierce Irish wizard pacing through tired but relieved eyes.

Haylin whirled around to fiercely glare at Draco; after years of that expression, Draco recognized it not as a look of anger, but one of sincerity and determination, and even a touch of rugged affection. "We're really glad you're with us," the older werewolf pledged in a low growl, through his teeth. "Y'know tha', right? No matter what."

Draco was surprised that this, as much as Margaret's tender ovations, made him crumble. He had to cover his face for a moment, and to nod weakly, before he could regain composure in front of them.

Renard, who had relaxed his shoulders, but whose face had acquired the piercing comprehension that was characteristic of his keen mind, nodded fervently. There were tears in his sensitive blue eyes. "Oui, souvent--always," he too promised. "I can make the wolfesbane. Or my mother can, since she's a Healer…. It'll be okay, Draco. Stay."

At the word wolfesbane, Susan gasped. Draco squeezed his eyes shut, he couldn't see his other girl devastated by this news in the same half-hour span. But he smelled soap and honey and felt warm soft arms around his neck, and knew it was too late, she was so eager, always, to comfort him. She always had been. All of them had.

For a moment, he dared to let this make him feel uncompromisingly, completely happy.

There were some people Draco needed to talk to. Soon. He would not be outside looking in any longer. He would act.


End file.
